Men on a Mission

Several years ago there was a boy. He had a great deal of interest in a great many things, but none of them offered him that intangible something that he wanted. Perhaps a medium that best suited his tastes or something of significant depth that he could really sink his teeth into. One day, the boy fell ill and stayed home from school. There, bored, he rifled through some cabinets looking for something to do. He fell upon his older brother's DVD of Reservoir Dogs. He had little else to do, so he decided to take a gamble on something that his brother clearly liked, which, of course, doesn't always pay off.

But when that movie ended, that boy couldn't bring himself to move a muscle. Completely transfixed by the power of a medium he had never seen harnessed, he knew at that moment that he must start a blog. In four years.

So as you can imagine, Quentin Tarantino has a very, very special place in my heart. I've never regarded him as a truly Great filmmaker.

Until now.

I always though of him as a great writer who also happened to direct his writing, for he transformed the face of cinema and kickstarted the independent movement essentially based on his scripts.

Kill Bill is a great film(s), but it's not as groundbreaking or genre-bending as Pulp Fiction and it's not as gut-wrenching and visceral as Reservoir Dogs. But Death Proof really dampened my faith in the man. Not only was it overlong and terribly boring, but it somehow seemed to isolate all his worst impulses and leave out any of the things that make those bad impulses work in his other films.

If someone were to have told me a week ago, or five hours ago, that Inglorious Basterds would somehow combine the genre-bending and inspired dialogue of Pulp Fiction with the open gut wound that is Reservoir Dogs and wrap it in a flour tortilla of the loving kitsch that makes Kill Bill so unique, I would likely have declared you mad and had you spend the rest of your days having your hair harvested for wig-makers to practice on.

I would have been wrong. I would have falsely imprisoned you, and I would wear your wigs if I ever went bald so that at least one part of you would be able to glimpse the outside world again.

Inglorious Basterds may well be the perfect alignment of the planets otherwise known as Tarantino's body of work (which is very different from it being his best film). It combines everything that is great about him and rolls up his bad impulses in a rug and heaves it into a deep river where it will be retrieved as treasure by 24th century rug pirates.

But as is tradition here at Herr Machine, I'm way ahead of myself. Here's the plot for those of you who don't know (for those of you who do know, I'm purposefully insulting your intelligence): Brad Pitt is Lt. Aldo "The Apache" Raine. He is the leader of a squad known as The Basterds, assembled of the finest Jewish-American soldiers and sent deep behind enemy lines to, well, murder the fuck out of the Germans. Why? To strike fear into the hearts of the enemy. When they see the mutilated corpses that they leave in their wake, whether they be scalped, disemboweled or or bludgeoned to death the Germans will talk and fear will spread until the Basterds are the boogieman of the American army. And isn't that just a marvel of anti-history and affectionate kitsch?

Several sub-plots weave in and out of that story, including a famous German actress, a very evil Nazi officer named Hans Landa, a young Jewish woman operating a cinema in Paris and a young Nazi war hero.

The principle actors include Brad Pitt as Aldo the Apache, a role that recalls a seeming phantom of my movie-going history. His cartoonish character is required to smirk at the camera, never deviate from the speech patterns branded to his tongue and blow my mind. If American soldiers were told about a man who kills and scalps hundreds of Nazis and commands a group of soldiers that beat Nazis to death with baseball bats, Brad Pitt's Aldo is exactly the image they would conjure. That doesn't mean he's the least bit realistic, he's every bit as batshit as the mythology and it is a ballsy performance for Pitt, as anyone could easily mistake his performance for a lazy caricature. But the way that Pitt maintains this cartoonish persona at the same time as wrapping his tongue around Tarantino's tricky dialogue every bit as well as the finest actors who have found themselves in front of his lens makes Pitt's performance one of his finest, if not his very finest, performances ever.

But the real stand out is Christoph Waltz as the very evil Col. Hans "The Jew Hunter" Landa. His talent is only something that Tarantino could pull off: he is a wordsmith. Someone who can extract information and get anyone to do anything he wants with his devilish charm. Every second he circles his target, waiting for the exact. Right. Moment. To strike. That doesn't mean that he waits a few minutes, that means he draws his prey in closer and closer for an agonizingly suspenseful period of time, but the deathblow is so quick you could blink and miss it.

Waltz gives a performance so glorious and spectacularly realized, that I may have to call it the best performance ever in a Tarantino film by a significant margin, and let me stress that that includes ALL the great performances in Tarantino's films. Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs. Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Pam Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown. Uma Thurman and David Carradine in Kill Bill. Writing that list of performances, I couldn't help but chortle at how far into the stratosphere Christoph Waltz blows them.

One of the chief pleasures of a Tarantino film is that the man just can't contain himself. His passion is infectious. Passion for film, passion for dialogue, passion for stories. People who complain that his scenes go on too long aren't on the same wavelength and they aren't experiencing the same movie I am. The film I saw was a 150-minute love letter to 100 years of filmmaking tradition. And not just the tradition that the critics fawn over, or even the masses, but the little things. The forgotten films that indulge our basest desires are given more cuddle time than any Citizen Kane, and why not? Tarantino loves the medium unconditionally, and that's why he's a cinephile's director. His films are a greatest-hits compilation of world filmmaking, the kind of greatest hits compilation that makes you proud to watch hundreds of movies a year.

Watch! as Tarantino slowly ratchets up the tension in his dialogue. Watch! as the dialogue sizzles and boils for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. Watch! as guards go up and tensions rise. Watch! as those tensions catch fire. Watch! as those tensions erupt like a fucking volcano. And let's watch it again. It's a trick I didn't know Tarantino had, and it is glorious. It is glorious for its ballsiness, it is beautiful for its experimental nature. Something this experimental hardly finds its way into 3000 theaters and my pulse quickens at the thought of people seeing something this bold, this sharp, this original, this flippant, this violent, this funny, this complex, this exciting, this visceral, this great.

When I say I love a film, I mean just that. I love the bloody fucking bejeezus out of this movie. I write this only a few hours after having seen the film, and every second that I'm not seeing it again is time wasted. At one point I looked at my phone to check the time and I realized there was only another half hour in the movie. I sighed a sigh of sadness. I could have gone for another two hours of this movie. I loved every frame of this film, every word of dialogue. I fucking loved this movie.

10/10